Please like me #2

Margaux Blanchart is a graduate of the academy of fine arts of Liège (ESAVL, 2021). She uses the image that we reflect of ourselves and the tools that are social networks, as fields of experiment. The visual artist, who only uses herself as a model, appears and disappears from one artwork to another, performing our contemporary attitudes and stereotypes.

Please like me #2 (1) features an installation that consists of a window-sized banner, loaded with self-portraits that the artist has posted on Instagram over the years, as well as stickers, which divert the incentive to like the content posted on this same social network.

The artwork occupies the commercial space of the street, in the same way that the commerce of influencers uses the commercial digital space of Instagram. With the exception that here the call for consumption merges into a more raw and frontal demand. Please like me unfolds a desperately sentimental lament against algorithmic fatalism.

While the first window (Please like me #1, AAC9) staged, not without humor, the preparation and the pause time that are necessary for a successful selfie, this second window (Please like me #2, AAC10) plays with a darker and more melancholic atmosphere. The black and white photographs come from the unpublished works of the artist. The supernumerary production of images highlights the serial aspect of a face-to-face with oneself, with others, a face-to-face with time.

(1) The Please like me project unfolds in two windows and an Instagram account @utilisateur2937, which often extends calls for “likes” throughout Art Au Centre. Please like me #2 follows on from the previous window: Please like me #1 (6 Rue Saint-Adalbert).